Bellow you can find extended documentation about some of the programs
installed in computers running GNU/Linux. The programs run in the
math.tifr.res.in system; if you are connecting from outside that
system perhaps some program wil not be available; contact your system
administrator for installing them in your computer(s).

The icon means a manual page
formatted in HTML with man2html. The icon
will take you to a website
outside the School of Maths' server.

Select a letter to display all entries in the software list
which begin with that letter.
Or you can check
here for an index by topics.

rcs,
Revision Control System, a program that allows you to keep different
versions of a file/document in a single "control" file;
good, for example, when you are editing a file very frequently
and do not want to have too many files with similar names

renice,
to change priority of running processes, so they can be slowed
down allowing the system to work faster on more important tasks.
You can look at the information about nice
command that allows you to start a process with low priority.

tar,
a program to create and manipulate archives ("tar files")
which are actually collections of many other files

tcsh,
a very popular shell (that is, the basic program that allows you
to execute commands, and it is the one you run after login in the
system). An example of a configuration file can be found
here.
The other popular shell is bash

tee,
reads from standard input (basically keyboard or a file) and writes
to standard output (screen) and files; good if you want to write
something to a file and see what is written at the same time

telnet,
allows you to log on in a computer conneted to the Internet or
a local network

telnet-ssl,
like telnet above but with crypted communication, to increase
security

TeX,
to typeset mathematical documents; this is the manual page of the
command "tex"; there is lot of documentation in the
Internet

time,
runs programs and tells how much time (real time and computer usage)
they take

traceroute,
finds the route that packets take between your computer and another
computer connected to the Internet or a local network. It might not
work if your computer is behind a firewall that does not allow
ping (for security reasons)

transfig,
creates a make file to translate figures in FIG code to LaTeX

unzip,
extracts or lists the files in a "qip" archive (a type of file
that has many files within it)

uuencode, puts
a binary file in an encoded format so it can be sent over email
as a simple text file; the reverse process is done with
uudecode. Nowadays most mail programs
can do similar things via MIME without need for the user to do
any extra processing

zdiff,
shows differences between two compressed files; see also
diff for looking at differences between
two "regular" files and tkdiff
for a nice graphical program that shows differencese between two
"regular&qout; files

zip,
creates ZIP archives, that is files that contain other files inside; see
also tar and cpio,
two ther programs that create archives

If you do not find information about some command in the above list,
you can browse the manual pages in this local
search engine